If your nocturnal habits are based on endurance, Wilma-10 could be the perfect choice to escort you through the night.  Using the latest 920 lumen Wilma lamp unit with integrated PCS switch unit, Wilma-10 comes with an ultra-lightweight 10.0Ah Li-ion bottle battery which provides an amazing run time of 5 hours 30 minutes.  Includes the Micro charger for rapid recharging.

Fnarr fnarr, as Finbarr Saunders would say.

A few pages before that there is a saddle that costs an incredible £225, which goes by the name of “Scratch Nack“.  I don’t know about anyone else, but for £225 I would want a saddle that prevented nack scratches rather than boasting about them!

Jokes aside, it is a wide range, and although some parts are ridiculously expensive (i.e. more than the price of my entire bike) it does contain cheap stuff too, and I am a bit tempted by a particular set of pedals in there.  The place is just down the road from where Charlie got his motorbike in Redhill, so I might pop in there.

I certainly won’t go to their website though.  It has to be the most feature- and content-free commercial site I have ever seen.  All it has is their address, phone number and email address. Plus a link to the web designers – whose motto/slogan is “no nonsense websites”.  Very apt.

I think I shall celebrate by taking the car in tomorrow.

In retrospect, starting some sort of excercise after so many years of sloth might have been better done when we were not suddenly experiencing hot weather.  I would have been so happy to see drizzle today.  I still haven’t settled on a preferred route yet.  I have gone four different ways already.  Straight down Pease Pottage Hill and then up Brighton Rd in Southgate looks like being a good one though.

The big problem is finding a way home that is not too arduous: difficult when you live on top of a hill.  I have tried approaching home various ways, but you just can’t get here without climbing somewhere.  Still not sure if its worse to have a long gentle hill or a short, steep one.

I wonder how long it will take before I can take either in my stride?  It used to take me a week to get used to cycling each year, but then I was in my twenties.  I have felt myself remembering in disbelief what it felt like as a teenager. Remember how you would just cycle everywhere for hours and it never felt like hard work at all?

Tonight I used my car for the first time since Thursday and that felt strange.  Its only 1 litre but I kept getting impressed that it could actually do 30 mph+ going uphill.

Almost immediately I was annoyed by those grippy harness things on the pedals that you are supposed to put your feet into.  Maybe its something you can get used to, but I just couldn’t.  The problem is that gravity makes them hang down, but to get your foot in you really need them on top.  I ended up letting them hang down and then got annoyed by them clipping the floor sometimes. I made a mental note to either get used to them really quickly or take them off.

The real problem was the height of the saddle.  It seemed OK at first, but after a few hundred metres I decided that it could do with coming up a bit as I could not really extend my legs properly.  When I stopped to adjust it I found that, unlike my old bike and the various kids’ bikes over the years, you need an allen key, which I didn’t have on me.  After a couple of kilometres it became less an irritation and more of a real problem because it was dead uncomfortable.

When I got home my legs were killing me.  Part of that is obviously down to not being used to exercise, but I hope part of it is down to not being able to stretch my legs properly.  Back home I dug out an allen key and moved the saddle up.  I think I’ll go for a little spin tomorrow to make sure it feels good.  Today I also removed those harness things.  I’m sure some people swear by them, but I’m a little set in my ways and far happier doing without.

I think I’ll wait to see if the cycling causes any weight loss and firming up before I inflict the lycra shorts on everyone else though…

As if on cue, it started raining this evening.

The whole Cycle2work scheme has gone very smoothly.  On Monday I filled out the paperwork, on Wednesday the voucher/letter of collection arrived in the post, today I went into Halfords and picked out a bike and all sorts of accessories, and tomorrow I collect the bike.

The way it works, I felt like it wasn’t my own money I was spending so when choosing accessories I wasn’t asking myself ‘which is the cheapest lock/helmet/pump?‘ but ‘which is the most suitable or best lock/helmet/pump?‘ so I ended up with (I hope) stuff that will last well.  My voucher was for £450 and the bike I wanted was £299.99 so I had a budget of £150.01 for accessories.  I picked out some mudguards, lights, a pump, a helmet, a backpack and a lock and went to tot it all up to see if I had bust the budget or still had more to go: it came to £149.94 so in the absence of anything on sale for 7p I stopped there.

Actually I still have another fifty quid to spend because Halfords are giving you accessories to that value if you buy a bike costing more than £250, so I’ll get a hi-vis waistcoat and some other bits tomorrow.  With that extra offer added to the savings on income tax, VAT and NI I will end up with £500-worth of stuff costing me less than £250 – spread over 18 months.

So a real bargain, and with any luck I’ll end up fitter (and slimmer) as a result.  What could possibly go wrong?

Everyone else was in a minor panic, thinking I was maybe not coming in.  When the boss asked why I didn’t phone to say I would be in late I had to point out that we are on flexi-time and I just chose, for once, to arrive at the late end of our range of start time rather than the early end.  It not that I am indispensible or anything, I think its just that everyone is used to me already being there when they turn up – I know I am.  It threw me out for the whole half day, not being able to mentally prepare myself for the day ahead, deal with a few e-mails, etc. before everyone else is around.

After work I went over to Halfords to look at bikes.  I am probably going to go for a Carrera Vulcan and then spoil the effect by having mudguards and a rear pannier, but now I know how much to ask for from the cycle2work scheme – £400 to £450 to allow for all those accessories.  Must make a point of doing all the paperwork on Monday, because the scheme only runs until Friday.

After that I went to soak up the misery while having an afternoon breakfast in the cafe at Broadfield.  The misery was all due to the establishment being resolutely Portugese.  I think they were all still suffering the emotional fallout from getting kicked out of the Euros by the Germans.

Highlight of the day was finding out that Chrystal is going to take me to see Paul Weller at K2 in Crawley. Apparently Radio Mercury were running some sort of competition and she had to approach somebody in the town centre to get the tickets.  Brilliant.  I had been thinking about getting tickets for this show, and now I’m glad I was slow in getting around to it.

If I went to buy a new bike I know I would end up with the cheapest in the shop again – a bike is not my highest priority and they all look the same, so why fork out £300+ when there is something for £70?  That is the false economy I would probably make, but with this scheme you get a bike, plus accessories, and pay over 18 months, before tax.  For a higher-rate taxpayer than can work out at less than £15 a month for a really good bike – and you can save that much in petrol just by not driving to work.

The scheme my company is running expires at the end of next week so I’ll have to make my mind up quickly.   On the one hand its a real bargain, saves the planet a little bit, and would be good for whatever is left of my cardio-vascular system.  On the other hand… its going to be hard work on those hills,  a slightly longer journey, the chance of getting to work all sweaty – unless I get mowed down by a truck on the way.

It might be an excuse to start using the iRiver again though…  the more I weigh up the pros and cons the better it sounds.

Its easy enough to make jokes about it, and the headline seems to say it all, but I think the man in question has had a bit of a rough deal. Not that I want to encourage anyone to go around having sex with bikes or anything, but what harm was he doing?

Its not as if he was out in public defiling a bike shelter. He was in his own bedroom at a hostel when cleaners came in. Would they have involved the police if he was just knocking one out with a copy of Razzle in one hand?

The cleaners say they knocked on his door and had no reply so they then used a master key. For some reason I was reminded of this passage in Spike Milligan’s novel Puckoon:

‘Where the hell is Puckoon?’ Webster was about to ask, when there was a combined knocking and opening of the door, the speciality of landladies in need of scandal

Worst of all for the trick-cyclist, he was placed on the sex offenders’ register for three years. Admitttedly his behaviour was bizarre, even for someone who had been drinking a lot, but he was doing nothing illegal, and he was doing it in his own bedroom, and with his own bike.

He claims it was “caused by a misunderstanding after he had too much to drink”. Hmmm… One hell of a misunderstanding, although I’m sure plenty of holidaymakers in Faliraki have woken up to worse after a night on the sauce, but even if it was pre-meditated bike-shagging I don’t think it merits going on the sex offenders’ register.

At least he wasn’t riding it on the pavement…

Secondly, I did not blast, and I am not an angry cyclist.

This will mean nothing to anyone who has not read this week’s Crawley Observer, where they put my photo of a short stretch of cycle path on page two with various ‘quotes’ from me – mostly just lifted from this site.

You get the impression that I spotted the photo opportunity while I was cycling up Southgate Avenue, but the truth is I saw it from the car a while ago but only had the chance to get a decent picture while I was out canvassing just over the road on Saturday.

The even sadder truth is that I have not actually been on my bike for quite a while, and it has been even longer since I rode it regularly. I think I still have a cyclist’s mentality, but could not claim to be one, let alone an angry one.

I do know that the path continues on the other side of the concrete bits – but I took the photo to look vaguely amusing, not to highlight a serious issue. Southgate Avenue is not great for cycling, but it is better than it was. Recent roadworks have removed some of the obstacles from the way, although it is true that I would not consider using it personally, and its not as perfect as the WSCC spokeswoman makes out.

Having managed to survive cycling through the Wandsworth one-way system twice a day for several years I wouldn’t think twice about doing Southgate Avenue!

One last point: the Creative Commons share-alike license I use says that anyone can use my pictures, even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit the work. I didn’t see any credit for the picture at all. I’ll let that go if they say nice things about Labour during the local elections.

Next time I see the reporter from the Observer I think I will have to deliver his paper to him in such a way that he knows what it feels to be saddle-sore But he probably knows, since news-gathering now seems to consist of sitting on one’s arse looking for stuff on the Internet.

Still… they do say there is no such thing as bad publicity, even though I usually prefer to have none just to be on the safe side. I should have put up a picture of my tattoos instead: I would have got on page three then.